Maddalena Ferrario (Cohaerentia CEO) and Paola Parolari now under the kind support of Paolo Magni, Business Developer at EIT Digital in Italy.

On 4 December 2015, EIT Digital organised in Paris a special day focused around innovations in the Cyber-Physical Systems domain with its partners, start-ups and students.

At EIT Digital, Cyber-Physical Systems represent one of the eight Action Lines around which we develop innovations with partners and start-ups.

Cyber-Physical Systems enable the physical world to merge with the virtual one. Robotics, cobotics, Internet of Things, 3D Printing, smart sensors are essential ingredients of Cyber-Physical Systems. Their best usage is illustrated through the development of Smart Manufacturing initiatives.

Julien Mascolo, Senior Researcher at our partner Fiat Research Centre, started by presenting the future of manufacturing for the automotive industry. He succeeded in making the whole room dream since it really seemed magic to digitalize a factory that people may still associate with dirty, dangerous, repetitive and annoying tasks. This empowers the worker into an operator with real added value. Julien Mascolo gave some examples of applications of future technologies such as augmented reality, 3D printing, exoskeleton and human-robot collaboration resulting in easy, fast, efficient, secure and beautiful manufacturing (see video on the right).

"The strength of a robot is its repeatable precision", said Julien Mascolo

The exoskeleton was the most astonishing technology to be presented since nobody in the room realized that its application in manufacturing has been developed for years, for example in Toyota, and will continue to expand in the future. It will help human operators not only to be physically stronger in the factory, but also to be supported with knowledge relevant to their tasks. See full slides deck HERE.

In each of its Action Lines, EIT Digital makes its European partners work together and innovate through different projects, leading the trends of each domain. Here in particular, EIT Digital works with Fiat Research Centre, together with CEA, Cefriel, DFKI, Aalto University and Siemens, in an initiative involving human-robot collaboration (see video on the right).

The Cyber-Physical Systems innovations were also illustrated through students and start-ups initiatives.

EIT Digital Doctoral School is a programme where doctoral candidates acquire a mindset for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, besides a deep technology knowledge. Wilfried Dron, doctoral candidate at Pierre and Marie Curie University and entrepreneur, presented an Innovation Activity that he is currently leading with other EIT Digital partners in the Cyber-Physical Systems Action Line.

"I learnt from EIT Digital Doctoral School that I could innovate in both science and business", said Wilfried Dron

EIT Digital also works with start-ups to accelerate their innovations at the European level. The EIT Digital Accelerator is currently coaching 13 European start-ups in the Cyber-Physical Systems Action Line.

Two of them, 3YourMind (3D printing) and Sentryo (industrial internet security), presented their solutions. Both of them are winners of the start-ups contest Idea Challenge in 2014 and have been coached by our business developers and access to finance managers across Europe since then.

"We wanted to be a French-German company. EIT Digital helped us since it is a European-wide organisation", said Thierry Rouquet, Sentryo CEO.

In the afternoon, the Cyber-Physical Systems Idea Challenge 2015 final took place. 9 European start-ups were pitching on stage in front of an international jury of experts (see article).